LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bettie Page, the 1950s secretary-turned-model whose controverisal photographs in skimpy attire or none at all helped set the stage for the 1960s sexual revolution, died Thursday. She was 85.

Page was placed on life support last week after suffering a heart attack in Los Angeles and never regained consciousness, said her agent, Mark Roesler. He said he and Page's family agreed to remove life support. Before the heart attack, Page had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia.

"She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," Roesler said. "She is the embodiment of beauty."

Page, who was also known as Betty, attracted national attention with magazine photographs of her sensuous figure in bikinis and see-through lingerie that were quickly tacked up on walls in military barracks, garages and elsewhere, where they remained for years.

Her photos included a centerfold in the January 1955 issue of then-fledgling Playboy magazine, as well as controversial sadomasochistic poses.

"I think that she was a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact on our society," Playboy founder Hugh Hefner told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She was a very dear person."

Page mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for decades, during which time she battled mental illness and became a born-again Christian.

After resurfacing in the 1990s, she occasionally granted interviews but refused to allow her picture to be taken.

"I don't want to be photographed in my old age," she told an interviewer in 1998. "I feel the same way with old movie stars. ... It makes me sad. We want to remember them when they were young."

The 21st century indeed had people remembering her just as she was. She became the subject of songs, biographies, websites, comic books, movies and documentaries. A new generation of fans bought thousands of copies of her photos, and some feminists hailed her as a pioneer of women's liberation.

Gretchen Mol portrayed her in 2005's The Notorious Bettie Page and Paige Richards had the role in 2004's Bettie Page: Dark Angel. Page herself took part in the 1998 documentary Betty Page: Pinup Queen.

Hefner said he last saw Page when he held a screening of The Notorious Bettie Page at the Playboy Mansion. He said she objected to the fact that the film referred to her as "notorious," but "we explained to her that it referred to the troubled times she had and was a good way to sell a movie."

Page's career began one day in October 1950 when she took a respite from her job as a secretary in a New York office for a walk along the beach at Coney Island. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs admired the 27-year-old's firm, curvy body and asked her to pose.

Looking back on the career that followed, she told Playboy in 1998: "I never thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It's just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous."

Nudity didn't bother her, she said, explaining: "God approves of nudity. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds."

In 1951, Page fell under the influence of a photographer and his sister who specialized in S&M. They cut her hair into the dark bangs that became her signature and posed her in spiked heels and little else. She was photographed with a whip in her hand, and in one session she was spread-eagled between two trees, her feet dangling.

"I thought my arms and legs would come out of their sockets," she said later.

Moralists denounced the photos as perversion, and Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Page's home state, launched a congressional investigation.

Page quickly retreated from public view, later saying she was hounded by federal agents who waved her nude photos in her face. She also said she believed that, at age 34, her days as "the girl with the perfect figure" were nearly over.

She moved to Florida in 1957 and married a much younger man, as an early marriage to her high school sweetheart had ended in divorce.

Her second marriage also failed, as did a third, and she suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1959, she was lying on a sea wall in Key West when she saw a church with a white neon cross on top. She walked inside and became a born-again Christian.

After attending Bible school, she wanted to serve as a missionary but was turned down because she had been divorced. Instead, she worked full-time for evangelist Billy Graham's ministry.

A move to Southern California in 1979 brought more troubles.

She was arrested after an altercation with her landlady, and doctors who examined her determined she had acute schizophrenia. She spent 20 months in a state mental hospital in San Bernardino.

A fight with another landlord resulted in her arrest, but she was found not guilty because of insanity. She was placed under state supervision for eight years.

"She had a very turbulent life," Todd Mueller, a family friend and autograph seller, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She had a temper to her."

Mueller said he first met Page after tracking her down in the 1990s and persuaded her to do an autograph signing event.

He said she was a hit and sold about 3,000 autographs, usually for $200 to $300 each.

"Eleanor Roosevelt, we got $40 to $50. ... Bettie Page outsells them all," he told The AP last week.

Born April 22, 1923, in Nashville, Page said she grew up in a family so poor "we were lucky to get an orange in our Christmas stockings."

The family included three boys and three girls, and Page said her father molested all of the girls.

After the Pages moved to Houston, her father decided to return to Tennessee and stole a police car for the trip. He was sent to prison, and for a time Betty lived in an orphanage.

In her teens she acted in high school plays, going on to study drama in New York and win a screen test from 20th Century Fox before her modeling career took off.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Adrian 'The Energizer' Bromley passed away in his sleep on December 7th, 2008 at the young age of 37. He had just celebrated his birthday on November 30th. An update from the Brave Board at BraveWords.com reads as follows:

"Adrian passed in his sleep, from complications due to pneumonia. A trust account will be set up in Adrian's name where if people want to make donations, they can. Donations will go towards the Canadian Cancer Society. A cause very close and dear to Adrian.

There will not be a funeral service nor a wake for Adrian. A memorial event will be planned for the near future, where people all can gather to share their memories of the life and their times with Adrian.

To say that Adrian was active in the metal scene is an understatement. Early in his journalism career he worked at Canada's M.E.A.T Magazine (along with BW&BK's Carl Begai and "Metal" Tim Henderson). Soon-after, Adrian, along with Gino Filicetti formed one of the world's first extreme metal webzines called Chronicles Of Chaos. Adrian went on to create Unrestrained! Magazine which gained worldwide popularity in the extreme underground realm. More recently he worked press and publicity at The End Records and moved on to form Ixmati Media, a company that represented the likes of Listenable Records, Blistering Records, Northern Storm Records, Ibex Moon Records, Shadow Kingdom Records among others. He had also started his new label called Absurdist Records.

BW&BK President/CEO "Metal" Tim Henderson had this to say about his passing: "We are in total shock. We used to joke that BW&BK and Unrestrained! were vicious rivals, but that was totally inaccurate. I'd known Adrian since the M.E.A.T. days in Toronto in the late '80s as we all were trying to cut it as potential journalists! Hell, he lived on our BraveBoard! You won't meet anybody in this biz that worked as hard as Adrian, fighting for "the cause" at every waking moment. And the key was that his heart was in the right place. He'd give you his left arm if you needed it. Always a friendly hand-shake or a heavy metal hug. Every band and label that Adrian represented felt his presence. His head was filled with a sea of metal knowledge - underground and above ground. Virtually every conversation we had was about music - it was his life. Adrian had incredible vision, always thinking of ideas on how to push the scene to greater heights. Those of us based in Toronto - take a look around at your next metal show/gathering. Adrian touched every one of those souls as he helped the scene grow larger than ever.

Damn, it as just over a year ago we lost Ray "Black Metal" Wallace. Life just ain't fair.

He will be terribly missed..."

OK, we have confirmed a date for the memorial for Adrian, it will be on Saturday Janurary 17 at The Opera House, In Toronto. All are encouraged to attend. More details will be listed in the next couple of days, with an official announcement thread made as well.”

NEIL YOUNGIn The Eye Of The HurricaneInterview by Jas Obrecht/Guitar Player/March 1992

JO: Could you have recorded 'Weld' with '60s era equipment?

NY: Not without the Whizzer, because that's how I get the guitar sounds to change subtly. The Deluxe goes up to 12---not 11---and with everything floored, if you back it down to 10-1/2 from 12, all of a sudden it's chunky sounding on the attack. If you have it up on 12, then it just saturates completely and opens up after the attack. But if you back it down, it'll catch the attack. So I've got one button just to change that one thing that much.

On a Fender Deluxe, there's tone and two volumes. The volume on the channel you're not using will affect the volume of the channel you are using, even when you're not plugged into it, because of the drain on the power amp. Having the ability to bring up the channel I'm not even using---so the overload thing comes on---or to change the treble here and there---those are the things I couldn't have done without this technology. Technology hasn't affected the sound, only the control of the sound.

JO: What's the source of your feedback? Amp gain, devices?

NY: Volume. There is no amp gain. We don't use a distorted effect at all. Just the Fender Deluxe.

JO: Do you take that amp on the road?

NY: Oh, yeah. I couldn't go without it. There is no spare. I've got 10 spares, but none of them sound like it. All Fender amps are different, made with different amounts of metal and windings, all these things. The transformers are all different powered. Everything used to be loose, y'know, so every combination of specs was different. I got mine for $50 at Saul Bettman's Music on Larchmont in L.A. in 1967. Took it home, plugged in this Gretsch guitar, and immediately the entire room started to vibrate.

The guitar started vibrating, and I went, "Holy shit!" I turned it halfway down before it stopped feeding back. But I do a lot of things to make the sound more distorted, like by introducing an octave divider in conjunction with an analog delay, which is before the octave divider. The routing of these things is really important---what hits first and then gets hit by something else. I have a line of six effects, and I can bypass them completely or dip in and grab one without going through the one in front of it. Or I can use all six of 'em or any combination that I want. I set them up in any order so that they affect each other in a certain way, and that's how I get my sound.

NY: I have a digital echo that I use because it has a particular gated-echo sound. When I tried it out at the Guitar Center in Hollywood, the salesmen were demo-ing all these sounds like on a Phil Collins record or the background of a Cyndi Lauper record. I said, "Let me try it for a minute," turned everything all the way up except for the mix, and then I started playing the guitar really staccato. I turned the mix up and got whop, whop, whop, whop, like this giant popcorn machine exploding kind of a sound. I like that sound, so I use it as an effect. When I've gone just about as far as I can go, I stick that on it and just hit harmonics and choke them. It splats out all this ridiculous noise all over everything. But I don't use it in a real sense to get a sound that it was meant to get.

JO: What effects do you use the most?

NY: An original tube Echoplex, an MXR analog delay, a Boss flanger, and an old white Fender reverb unit with new springs that are separate. The springs are on a microphone stand that goes on the cement floor of the building. It extends up to the bottom of the stage, and the spring stands on top of the microphone stand and the wire comes through a hole in the stage completely separate. I can't use it if I don't do that, because if I jump onstage, the spring rattles. It has to be isolated from the surface of anything that's vibrating.

JO: What if you can't drill a hole in the stage?

NY: No, we do it. We just put a hole in the stage. There's always a way. It can't be very far away, because with a long wire, you lose the fidelity, the high end where the reverb lives, so the magic is gone. You've got to keep it close and really short.

JO: What do you look for in a guitar?

NY: I buy guitars mainly to remember something by. If I'm enjoying a place, I will try to find an old guitar in that area, and that will always remind me of when I was there. The way it sounds is the way I sounded when I was there. I've written a lot of songs on a Martin D-18 that I really like, and I stole that out of [manager]Elliot Roberts' office. I always think of Elliot's office whenever I play it. And there are other reasons to buy guitars. You can buy them because they're classics. I collect 'em, so I'll buy an Explorer or a Flying V or a Black Falcon or a White Falcon just because that's what it is. But I got those now, so I don't need those anymore. Material things are becoming less and less relevant to me, so I'm not contingent to buy guitars.

JO: Is any guitar so rare that you don't play it?

NY: No, nothing like that. I've got a Hank Williams' guitar, but I play it all the time. It's an old Martin D-28. I bought it from Tut Taylor. It's always great when someone understands what this is that they're holding, who understands the effect Hank Williams had on all of us. They are sort of awestruck by being in the presence of anything that he touched---to the point that to actually play his instrument elevates them to another level. It's a wonderful thing to have a guitar for that reason. A lot of people who should have played it, have played it. I'm careful about it, but I use it all the time. It's not on a wall in a museum.

JO: Do you still have your Buffalo Springfield guitars?

NY: Yeah, I still have every guitar I ever played, except for the one I traded to Stills for something else. I also have a Gretsch that Jim Messina had that's like the one I played in Buffalo Springfield.

JO: Are you a fan of Fenders?

NY: I've got a Broadcaster and a Telecaster and a couple of Stratocasters, but I don't play them that much.

JO: It's been reported that a main ingredient in your sound is one particular pickup.

NY: Well, there's a lively Firebird pickup on the treble side of my Les Paul, but when I did 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere', it didn't have that pickup, which had got a bad hum in it. I took it to a music store to see if they could do anything with it. I went back to get it, and the store was closed and everything was gone. I never got the pickup back, so now there have been two or three pickups in place of the original. I guess I used the Firebird pickup on all the things I played on my black guitar since 1973.

JO: In this age of high-tech whammies, what's the advantage of having a Bigsby?

NY: It works; it's expressive. The wang bars they have now are not expressive; they're too tight. You can go way down and come way back up and do these metal licks and still stay in tune. Big deal---stay in tune, great. You already were in tune. I go out of tune in every song, because the thing just doesn't stay in tune. But when you keep moving, you never know when you're in tune. It's like hand-controlled flanging. And if you have a tape repeat on, an Echoplex, and you just ever so slightly use the Bigsby, then your sound is going up and down, but the echo is always following behind it. So it's like you really have two guitars that are not only on two different attacks, but one's in a different pitch. It's a huge sound. I've got the Bigsby worn into my hand. I can't do anything else. It has to be a Bigsby.

JO: The British music paper NME recently named you "the grizzled godfather of gargantuan feedback."

NY [Laughs] I don't know what to say.

JO: One of the 'Ragged Glory' videos shows you shoving your headstock into a toilet bowl to create feedback.

NY: Oh. it's just Hollywood shit. None of that's real. A cinematic trick, but it was a nice toilet. The toilet was a good visual expression of my sound. I want people to know that that's where I get my sound.

JO: Everybody's heard stories of Jimmy Page recording guitars in a bathroom while miking 12 feet away. Do you experiment like that?

NY: Yeah, I'll try anything. That sounds like a good idea. If it's the right bathroom and the right kind of tile. He must have just liked the sound in there; it was very live, obviously, so he got a big sound doing that, for sure.

JO: What are your views on people going to college to learn guitar?

NY: Paints a pretty doomed picture of the future, doesn't it?[Laughs.] First of all, it doesn't matter if you can play a scale. It doesn't matter if your technique is good. If you have feelings that you want to get out through music, that's what matters. If you have the ability to express yourself and you feel good when you do it, then that's why you do it. The technical side of it is a completely boring drag, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I can't play fast. I don't even know the scales. A lot of the notes that I go for are notes that I know aren't there. They're just not there, so you can hit any note. I'm just on another level as far as all that goes. I appreciate these guys who play great. I'm impressed by these metal bands with their scale guys. Like I go, "Gee, that's really something." I mean, Satriani and Eddie Van Halen are genious guitar players. They're unbelievable musicians of the highest caliber. But I can't relate to it. One note is enough.

JO: 'Cinnamon Girl.' The one note solo.

NY: Oh yeah---two strings, though. The same note on two strings. The wang bar made every one sound different. When people say "one note solo," I listen to it and every one sounds different to me. It sounds like it's all different in that one place. As you're going in farther, you're hearing all the differences, but if you get back, it's all one.

JO: The 'Weld' version is remarkably true to the original.

NY: Yeah, it is. We tried to do our best---put a little of 'Norwegian Wood' on the end of it that one night. That was the only night we did that.

JO: What do you look for in a solo?

NY: Elevation. You can feel it. That's all I'm looking for. You can tell I don't care about bad notes. I listen for the whole band on my solos. You can call it a solo because that's a good way to describe it, but really it's an instrumental. It's the whole band that's playing. Billy Talbot is a massive bass player who only plays two or three notes. People are still trying to figure out whether it's because he only knows two or three notes or whether those are the only notes he wants to play.[Laughs.] But when he hits a note, that note speaks for itself. It's a big motherfuckin' note. Even the soft one is big.

JO: What's the appeal of working with Frank Sampedro?

NY: Frank uses the biggest strings of any guitar player I've ever seen. Frank is probably even more of a crude player than I am, because his lead isn't as developed as mine. But his strings are so big! .055 on the bottom, big wound third, .012 on the E string. He hits a note, and it's a big note. I hit a note, it's like here today, where's it going, what's happening? Without Crazy Horse playing so big, I sound just normal. But they supply the big so I can float around and sound huge. The big is them.

JO: Is jamming a lost art?

NY: I don't know, I haven't seen any jams lately.[Laughs.} You see all these concerts---what's happening?

NY: I don't think so. It's a logical extension of rock and roll today---if you want to go the other way, past Sonic Youth, just off. Feedback has always been there. There's always been a temptation to go that way. It's like jazz. It's the jazz of rock and roll, without a beat.

JO: Coltrane with feedback.

NY: Yeah, maybe. Coltrane is a big influence on me. I love a lot of his things. 'Equinox' and 'My Favorite Things' with McCoy Tyner---those are my favorite of his music.

JO: Which records couldn't you live without?

NY: See, I don't listen to anyone. I only listen to what other people put on, because I don't want to make the decision of what to listen to. I listen to what's going on in the world, what people like, because I hear it coming out of the car radio or the jukebox. I'll walk up to a jukebox and play things. I like to listen to B.B. King or Ray Charles or an old country thing, but it's mostly just for rehabilition purposes.

JO: What do you owe your audience?

NY: My life. Without my audience, who would I be playing for? What a lonely job that would be. I owe a lot to my audience. I'm not beholden to them---I don't have to actually send them something.[Laughs.] Maybe another record, if they like it.

JO: What's planned?

NY: An acoustic album with the Stray Gators, the band I did 'Harvest' with: [drummer] Kenny Buttrey, [bassist] Tim Drummond, [pedal steeler] Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham on piano instead of Jack Nitzsche. Working with different bands is what keeps me going. It keeps stirring the pot to put myself in a different situation, I don't ever try to tie myself into one group of people, because it stifles the music.

JO: Any words of encouragement for young players?

NY: Just start playing. Learn a few chords and play with someone who's maybe a little better than you. Don't learn from a book any more than you have to. Learning from other people is what music is all about. Pick up things and put them back together yourself. Use them to write new songs, to make new sounds, new chord changes, new time changes. Just create. Even if it's all shit, just keep creating. Pretty soon it'll be great.

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.

Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. She replied, “All of the songs Odetta sings.”

Odetta sang at the march on Washington, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, in August 1963. Her song that day was “O Freedom,” dating to slavery days: “O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me, And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free.”

Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.

“They were liberation songs,” she said in a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word.” “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life.”

Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later, Odetta discovered that she could sing.

“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”

She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.

“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.

In a 2005 National Public Radio interview, she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”

In 1950, Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.

She began singing in nightclubs, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair.

Her voice plunged deep and soared high, and her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” resonated with an audience hearing old songs made new.

Bob Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” It was her first, and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Water Boy,” “ ’Buked and Scorned.”

Her blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together, she said in her interview with The Times. The words and music captured “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.”

Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But after King was assassinated in 1968, the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.

In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Odetta the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities.

Odetta was married three times: to Don Gordon, to Gary Shead, and, in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first two marriages ended in divorce; Mr. Minter moved to Germany in 1983 to pursue his performing career.

She was singing and performing well into the 21st century, and her influence stayed strong.

In April 2007, half a century after Bob Dylan first heard her, she was on stage at a Carnegie Hall tribute to Bruce Springsteen. She turned one of his songs, “57 Channels,” into a chanted poem, and Mr. Springsteen came out from the wings to call it “the greatest version” of the song he had ever heard.

Reviewing a December 2006 performance, James Reed of The Boston Globe wrote: “Odetta’s voice is still a force of nature — something commented upon endlessly as folks exited the auditorium — and her phrasing and sensibility for a song have grown more complex and shaded.”

The critic called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”